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ON MONDAY MORNING, April 19,1897, readers of the Dalias Morning News saw this small headline: ''A Windmill Demolishes It." Beneath it appeared a 283-word dispatch from S.E. Haydon describing the crash of an alien "airship" at Aurora in Wise County.
"It was traveling due north," the story said. "Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was... gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed directly over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town collided with the tower of Judge Proctor's windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge's flower garden."
The only occupant was the "pilot of the ship," and "while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world."
T.J. Weems, the local U.S. Signal Service officer, "gave it as his opinion that he (the pilot) was a native of the planet Mars."
In addition, Haydon continued, papers found on the body "are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and can not be deciphered."
While the ship had been too badly damaged for any conclusions to be drawn "as to its construction or motive power, it was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat...